Satellite-based fire situation monitoring in Russia

Russia: Testing of the operational ScanEx Fire Monitoring Service (SFMS) has recently started. The service has been developed at the ScanEx Research and Development Center and unlike similar systems (e.g., NASA Rapid Fire, AFIS, etc.) offers access to data of several satellites of low, middle and high resolution.

For the purpose of the project, daily satellite imagery of the Russian territory is carried out with the data received at UniScan ground complexes, deployed in Moscow, Irkutsk and Magadan. At the first stage of the service testing in July, data of only the European part of Russia will be used (within the footprint of the UniScan station, installed in Moscow).

ScanEx Fire Monitoring Service web-service is intended for operational reception of satellite data about the location of fire areas on the Russian territory and to assess the damage incurred in case of fire. Fire areas are detected based on the MODIS sensor data which is the key instrument onboard the American Terra and Aqua satellites. The sensors’ can detect forest and steppe fires of 1 ha and more in size. As a result of processing geolocated images, one may delineate burning areas within a region of 1×1 km in size. The SFMS service ensures the possibility to view raster images in Google Earth, synthesised in natural colours from optical MODIS bands, which enables to assess the location of the cloud cover and the possibility to detect fires in the AOIs being monitored.

SFMS service data can be used not only for fire detection and monitoring, but also for monitoring of other targets, for example, flares on oil and gas fields.